Kelela’s latest record reframes genre as a linguistic shortfall. The nearer you press to articulate what new avatar achieves, the more inadequate the labels become. Not because the music is obscure or unknowable, but because the categories themselves cease to make sense. Kelela doesn’t simply blur boundaries; she reveals that they were never as firm as we imagined. The album isn’t propelled by novelty for its own sake, nor by the thrill of collision.
Every distortion, every mechanical throb, every smeared guitar line is propelled by a shared, quiet tenderness. Even at its most abrasive, new avatar never aims for confrontation merely to provoke. Beneath the friction lies an unmistakable softness, as if Kelela is pursuing closeness in spaces where language (and genre) have never kept pace. The intimacy outlives the usefulness of genre itself.
For more than a decade she has studied, expanded upon, and navigated that sacred quality of feeling. “Tenderness is a pursuit of mine—a soft, tender place from which I want to love,” she explained in a retrospective discussion of influential neo-soul voices like Faith Evans and Anita Baker.
In that same conversation she spoke of the power of falling in love. “I want it to happen again and again without us all growing worn down and cynical.” Now, nearing ten years since her debut Take Me Apart arrived, she engages in a chilling dialogue with her younger self, circling the emotions she once guarded. “Bear your cross, it’s your loss, now I’m jaded,” she intones on the opening track. Guitars flare up like wildfire around her. Destruction, decay, and a burned earth stage the starting point. That early exploratory optimism doesn’t vanish or sour here. It returns seasoned and, at times, more audacious.
new avatar thrives on refined abrasion. The guitars offer some of the album’s most dynamic textures, brushing against Kelela’s voice rather than merely supporting it. Sometimes it sounds rough, woolly like steel wool (“idea 1”); at others, it resembles wind gusting through a construction site (“goin down”). Although Kelela’s overall sound has always been pliant, her voice has long anchored it with deep honeyed tones and airy swiftness. Her voice still glides and pivots, but the clash with industrial beats and mournful guitars heightens the tension across these tracks. Consider the dramatic standout “goin down,” where her voice rings out lonely against reverberant guitars and veiled drum-work. It’s haunting and doom-laden, evoking a Burial mood.
The closing track “if we meet again,” a personal favorite, crystallizes the album’s fascination with blurred boundaries. It’s difficult to tell whether you’re hearing a processed guitar or a synthesizer. The melody spins in circles like a melancholic carousel, suspended somewhere between organic and synthetic, familiar and uncanny. Kelela isn’t bent on solving those ambiguities; she allows them to form the emotional core of the music.
new avatar reminds me how frustratingly genre labels can reduce art to a gimmick. It’s a psychological paradox where “genre-fluid” as a descriptor feels lazy, perhaps even offensive; a label that acknowledges complexity without truly describing it. Kelela has long collapsed the boundaries between her R&B-inflected vocals, electronic textures, pop sensibilities, and hip-hop. She keeps pursuing that blend on her latest album, but there’s a heavier emphasis on electric guitar, drawing from Incubus, Linkin Park, and Janis Joplin. Yet it would be overly simplistic to tag new avatar as a “rock” record. R&B has always contained rock’s DNA.
Yes, this is another meditation on how the roots of popular music are Black. The essence of rock is Black music. Treating distorted guitars as the line that separates R&B from rock confuses instrument choice with history. Every arrangement on new avatar seems engineered until the seams disappear, yielding music that doesn’t signal its influences but absorbs them into a wholly original language.
That alignment makes sense given Oscar Scheller’s role as Kelela’s main collaborator. The producer straddles indie terrain, yet Kelela has stressed that new avatar wouldn’t be her singing to indie-rock instrumentals. Instead, she aimed to craft “intersections” music that sits in a space “where it’s neither here nor there.” That is precisely what these songs accomplish. They’re too jagged to settle into R&B, too fluid to become rock, too emotionally elastic to remain within electronic music.
Another standout, “don’t piss me off,” embodies that balancing act perfectly. It carries a subdued menace, driven by a smoky aggression that never escalates. Kelela seldom raises her voice, yet she doesn’t need to. The threat emerges from the control in her delivery; the restraint is what gives the song its bite.
One of new avatar‘s smartest moves is where its features are placed in the mix. It’s a subtle sequencing decision, but it reshapes the album’s arc. Rather than presenting guests as a selling point, Kelela spends the opening stretch establishing the album’s gravitational pull. By the time other voices appear, they’ve joined her world, not the other way around. The lighter moments on new avatar arrive when she partners with two young Black artists who have already navigated the dissolving of genre, following the path she’s helped clear for them.
“new life forms” emerges as a speckled synth-pop and trip-hop hybrid. Kelela and Fousheé craft the perfect backdrop for parkside explorations and playful flirtation. Similarly, on “the bridge,” Kelela and PinkPantheress chase a celestial euphoria that feels unburdened and liberated. These collaborations serve as rejuvenating breaths before the breathtaking finale where Kelela faces hard truths: “I don’t want to hear that I’m the best you’ve found/ When nobody else is around.” It may not be a happily-ever-after, but Kelela chooses herself without romanticizing the end: “You could hear this song but you’ll never see/ All the ways you were killin’ me.” It may be the album’s most understated track, yet I keep returning to it, drawn to the measured depth of her acceptance and the pain she carries with composure.
What ultimately binds the album together is Kelela’s sense of responsibility. “Nothing is happening to me,” she noted. “There are things I’m observing, and then there are what I decide to do about it.” This stance elevates new avatar from a mood-board to an ethic. Kelela isn’t simply recording chaos; she’s choosing how to respond to it. That choice is why the album’s tenderness feels hard-won. It isn’t naive or merely optimistic, but a deliberate decision. It endures distortion, grief, and uncertainty without pretending they’ve vanished. In Kelela’s hands, tenderness isn’t the opposite of abrasion; it’s what grants the abrasion its purpose.
new avatar is released 7/10 on Warp.
Other albums of note this week:
The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues
Jack White’s Frozen Charlotte
Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s A ? Of WHEN
Future’s The Real Me
Show Me The Body’s Alone Together
Ultra Lights’ Pleasure’s All Yours
Twisted Teens’ Florida Water Blues
Allison Russell’s In The Hour Of Chaos
MOULD’s Hoping As A Coping Mechanism
Hew’s Your Version
Hurry’s Zoned Out
Finn Wolfhard’s Fire From The Hip
Magi Merlin’s Power House
The Menzingers’s Everything I Ever Saw
Will Sheff’s Extra Mile
Ebbb’s Shallow Hits
Gloorp’s Gloorp Life
Coco Smith’s You Won’t Get My Message But You’ll Hear It
Tracey Nelson’s Hercules
TENGGER’s SKY
Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead Xiu Xiu
No Cure’s It Is Going To Get Dark
Holy Wave’s i’m DADA
Eartheater’s Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message
sundayclub’s sundayclub
YEONJUN’s NO LABELS: PART 02
Fathers’ Fathers
Snag’s All The Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn To Dust
Compandas’ Tropical Finasteride
Joe James’ The Ends, Never Ends
Pain Gain’s Pain Gain
Yelawolf’s 45
Chuck Strangers’ Glory Of The King’s Hand
foamboy’s STUPID HOT
Bethany Wohrle’s Reason That I Sing
Quiet Husband’s THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERCEPTION
Marcus Charles’ [Spirit]
Eva Under Fire’s Villainous
Prateek Kuhad’s Full Moon Chamber
The Garden’s Bootleg
Daydream Plus’ Second Last Day Of Summer
i-dle’s We Mini Album
La Reezy’s Skiddle Bandana
Adam Lambert’s Adam
The Head And The Heart’s The Head And The Heart (Live At Neumos)
DEVILDRIVER’s Strike And Kill
2K88 & Lauren Duffus & Rainy Miller & Bianca Scout’s Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here
Baby Smith’s Lately, Love Is Dead
Luluc’s Sweet Thief
JORDY’s In Retrospect
Biribá Union’s Passing Go
Fraternal Twin Announce New Album Halo Fell Forever: Hear “Solitude”
Jacob Brodovsky’s Tell The Kids We Tried
Jesus Is The Path To Heaven’s power !
Park Hills Circle’s All Of A Sudden
Michael Cloud Duguay’s Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go
hackedepicciotto’s LICHTUNG
Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue / Live At The Aquarium
Suki Waterhouse’s Loveland
The Temper Trap’s Sungazer
Girl Trouble’s As Is
Piu’s Milao
Houndmouth’s Lordy
Jaco Jaco’s On The Levee
MAQUINA.’s BODY TRANSMISSION
Jack Grisham And The Life Undone’s Jack Grisham And The Life Undone
Bring Me The Horizon’s Count Your Blessings | Repented
Baby Jane’s Winter Forever
Compandas’ Tropical Finasteride
wave to earth’s bad pieces
Judah Weston & IsoKeys’ Why So Much Hate
The-Dream’s Love/Hate 2
Nick Kivlen’s Addicted To The Sunset
Bella Kay’s My Reckless Abandon
Sango’s RHYTHM & MELODY
Mo Troper’s Today I Played My Guitar And Sang
Suede’s Antidepressants: Expanded
Dux Content’s Lifestyle (Deluxe Reissue)
My Chemical Romance’s Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys (Deluxe)
Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 (Deluxe Edition)
Wet Leg’s Moisturizer (Deluxe)
Jacob Collier’s In My Room (10 Year Anniversary Edition)
little image’s KILL THE GHOST (Deluxe)
she’s green’s Swallowtail EP
Frost Children’s Tweaker EP
Pamela’s It’s Nice To See You Here EP’
Mouth Ulcers’ Silent Pictures EP
Ronboy’s Get Rich EP
MASKS’ First Life EP
Cutscene’s A Piece Of Life EP
Myth Math’s Tongues EP
Leah Nawy’s I Could Bloom From Here EP
Welcome Strawberry’s “desperate flower” remixes EP
Maya Engen’s Just My Luck EP
